#katyaaranel

[qqueenofhades]

Hi! It’s not an ask, just read your post about whether ordinary people in Russia support the war and commented on it, hope you don’t mind.

I can recommend a Russian channel that I love where recently there have been a lot of interviews with Russian people about what’s happening. The interviews are in Russian, but some of them have English subtitles. They offer a perspective of educated intelligent people, so it’s not an opinion shared by everyone, but they try to make sense of what’s happening.

Here is a link to the playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLynm3_86ldoTv06Qb-0MhzyDGgPxzZm3-

I can particularly recommend these two

https://youtu.be/8CW-WAJq0ts

https://youtu.be/vq7bAYFi-jE

So if you’re interested in this topic, you can watch them :)

Hope you have a nice day!

Thanks very much, and I'm glad to hear that you, as an actual Russian, thought that my analysis was accurate. I'll post this as future reference for me or anyone else who might be interested, though I'm still having to manage my information intake and trying not to check Twitter every three minutes. So we will see, but definitely a good resource to have, especially as the fog of war hangs heavy over much of the available information and it drags on into a second month.

As to my last post, my point was not that 1) everyone in Russia supports the war, or 2) everyone in Russia opposes the war, because clearly neither of those things are true. It's just to point out that since literally all the Russian state-sponsored information about this entire fiasco has been proven to be deeply and risibly false, we simply do not know what any kind of percentage or exact proportion of support or opposition might consist of, and there's no way to derive it from the existing numbers. One Russian sociologist estimates that only about 25% of Russian citizens are willing to talk to pollsters at all, and that they universely conclude that such surveys are conducted by the government, which in turn influences the answers they give. Besides (as you yourself already know, of course, but this is just for me to elaborate for my other followers), Russia exists, and has existed, for so long in its alternate information universe. Even a casual study of Russian and Soviet history makes plain that propaganda and ideology occupy a pivotal place in the intellectual and civic ecosystem, and that it is, to be blunt, largely or entirely fed by the dezinformatsiya of the ruling class. At least in terms of television or any other accessible media, and which obviously has an impact on shaping public mindset at the most molecular level.

I believe that two things can be true: i.e. that public support for Putin has probably ticked up to some degree, due to the Russian instinct to circle the wagons and support the leader in times of crisis, and due to the Kremlin propaganda machine's exceptional success in promoting its worldview and playing on the ancestral Russian hatred of "Nazis" (who are by now anyone that Putin and the siloviki don't like). Actual, genuine information doesn't really enter into it, and has been purposefully made as difficult and dangerous as possible to obtain. I also believe that we can't have any accurate notion of how widespread, authentic, or deeply rooted the public support for the "special military operation" actually is. If only 25% of people answer the poll at all, and then are willing to give genuinely honest answers on a topic as sensitive as Ukraine, and then you come up with 83% of 25% supporting the war, that translates to something like... maybe twenty percent of the population of a country of 144 million. Which is still a significant chunk, but not a majority, not even close to a majority, only counts the people willing to complete the exercise in the first place, and definitely doesn't count all the anti-war protesters who have either been arrested or already left the country. In short, as I said, it really doesn't ultimately tell us anything or allow us to draw informed conclusions, especially without any kind of detailed demographic breakdown or rigorous sampling method made available to check the poll's crosstabs independently. When you have demonstrably bad data from a source (the Russian government and state media apparatus) that has been proven to be manifestly and repeatedly untrustworthy, you can't just cite it as if it has self-evident authority and without extensive qualifications. This is Scholarship 101.

I do think that this war is exposing Russia's many shortcomings as a modern nation-state in all their ugly glory, and one of those is, as Anne Applebaum put it in her excellent and utterly harrowing history of the Gulag, "the political consequences of absent memory." The Russian people have simply not had a reckoning with their past the way Germany did after WWII, and which is begrudgingly happening in America despite all the kicking and screaming from the right-wing nutjobs. It's often felt that they tried liberalization in the 90s, that didn't work and led to the economy crashing, and now that Putin and his cronies are in power, it is in their interest to shut down any responsible or informed study of the past among their own people. In a sense, yes, of course the Russians support what they have been told for their entire existence is the Russian thing to do, and despite repeated sociopolitical and economic catastrophes resulting from this fact, they still have not yet been able to fundamentally change that system. It remains to be seen if they will, yet again, get away without doing so.

I can think of no more dramatic and stunning way to encapsulate this "absent memory" and its dire consequences than the reports currently coming out of Chernobyl. Literally the entire world knows what happened there in 1986, and many of us are also aware how it directly contributed to the collapse of the USSR, the polity which Putin so openly hankers to rebuild. So the fact that Russia would send soldiers in there, completely unprotected, to capture it -- and for that matter, recklessly shell the Zaphorizhia nuclear plant in an apparent attempt to force a new catastrophe -- is bad enough. This is especially the case since Chernobyl is defunct (it shut down in 2000) and doesn't actually produce power, but still requires round-the-clock monitoring. So it's not actually a valuable military or civic-infrastructure target (and this was even before the Russian forces went whole hog on the war crimes due to being unable to make meaningful progress otherwise). Why go there? Just to say you have it? Or... something?

Except now they're evidently evacuating the Russian soldiers from the Exclusion Zone, and the soldiers are -- you guessed it -- suffering from Acute Radiation Sickness, which means they will almost certainly die painfully in a short time. They were digging trenches in the goddamn Red Forest, the most irradiated place on earth where even the Chernobyl plant workers aren't allowed to go, and when the Chernobyl staff asked them directly if the soldiers had any goddamn hell idea where they were and what they were doing, the soldiers didn't know. They had no clue what Chernobyl was or why it was important. They just repeated over and over that it was "critical infrastructure." They had no idea that the world's worst nuclear accident had happened there or that it directly contributed to the breakdown of the USSR. And now, for that reason, they're all going to Belarus to probably, as I said, die painfully of radiation poisoning. That is... wow.

So yes. Until the Russian public finally comes to grips with the sheer depths of its absent memory and the terrible domestic and international political consequences, the Russian system which produced and enabled Putin and his fellow war criminals can't ever fundamentally and meaningfully change. As someone who studies Russian history, literature, and language, and is deeply interested in it overall, I sure hope it can do that, not least before it destabilizes the rest of the world. Whatever form this is going to take, who knows, but that is the Russian people's responsibility as a whole, and needs to be acknowledged.

[thisisevenharderthannamingablog]

katyaaranel reblogged your post “Rumple and Hook as Partial Reflections, aka My Continued Obsession with Mirrors”

Good gracious, thanks for all the reblogs. :)